Great Saltern House (now The Great Salterns pub) and the surrounding Great Salterns area are at the heart of Sarah Doudney's 1875 novel, The Great Salterns, set at some point in the decades before the novel was published. The middle-class Roscoe family move into the house at the start of the novel while the novel's poor but virtuous heroine Kate Bradley lives in a wooden cottage on wasteland nearby, with her father and her unscrupulous Uncle Luke. The novel opens with a detailed description of the House and surrounding area which emphasises their wildness and desolation, and indicates that the area was far less developed than it is today. However, it also looks back to a time when it had been the centre of a thriving salt industry (from which the area gains its name). The house is described as essentially the same as at present but far more surrounded by trees:
'It was a March afternoon; a fresh breeze was blowing off the sea, sweeping across the grassy flats and marshes, and fluttering Kate Bradley's coarse dress, as she stood looking out over the water. The tide was high; one or two crazy old blunt-headed boats were rocking on the ripples; and the spring sunshine rested peacefully on the slopes of Portsdown Hill, showing the great white chasms of the chalk-pits. Still farther off, lay the fair heights of Sussex, faint and blue in the distance; nearer, and on the right hand, were the coasts of Havant and Hayling [...]
She was standing on the edge of the road, which was raised above high-water mark. The water came gurgling round the piles and sea-stained stones that had resisted its advances for many a year. A wilder or more desolate spot could scarcely be found; yet at one time it had been the scene of busy occupation. Years ago, when the great salterns were in working order, the place teemed with life and industry, for the works had given employment to a large number of hands. But they had long been abandoned; fragments of ruined boiling-houses and sheds were still standing among the coarse grass and reeds, and adding to the dreary aspect of the waste land.
The road, strongly built on piles, crossed a bridge, under which the water flowed into the creeks. Then, slightly winding, it led on to the iron gate of the large, lonely house that stood with its back to the sea while its front windows commanded a view of the level country. It was a square white mansion, almost encircled by its lawn and shrubberies. The road swept completely round it, but the evergreens inside its ivied fence had grown thick and strong, and it was so well guarded by trees, that few glimpses of its lower storeys could be obtained.
This house was known as the Great Salterns. It might have been built by the master of the salt-works long ago; certain it is that it had been standing for many a year, and was substantial enough to brave the assaults of time and weather. But although it was sheltered by rich verdure in front, and clusters of primroses were growing within the fence, the north-eastern side of its grounds had a far different aspect. Here was a small plantation of firs, standing up gaunt and bare, with scarcely a tuft of green to be found on the blasted brown twigs. Nothing lovely seemed to flourish there; nor was there anything to be seen but a great level waste of slate-coloured mud, with the hills far behind it. This spot had a haunted look and an evil reputation' (The Great Salterns chapter 1).
Sarah Doudney (b.15 Jan. 1841, Portsea; d. 08 Dec.1926, Oxford) was an energetic and driven author of more than 75 works of fiction, poetry, and song. Much of her work was published in periodicals and magazines, including The Girls Own Paper, Charles Dickens’s All The Year Round, and the Evangelical periodicals, Good Words and The Quiver. Many of her 35 novels are directed at girls, but she also wrote adult fiction. Moral dilemmas, chaste romances, and religious themes dominate her writing, and she also specialised in Christmas stories. Her life and career are under-analysed in scholarship and wider culture but would offer insights into the complex intersections of Evangelicalism and literature in late-Victorian Britain; as well as being of potential interest to scholars of children’s literature. Her work is stylistically adept, if somewhat formulaic. Her work is generally conservative, seeing social problems such as inequality and class conflict as 'God's will', and arguing that the duty of believers is to submit quietly to the world as it is rather than to seek to change it through political activity.
A precocious talent, the 15 year old Doudney published ‘The Lesson of the Water Mill’ (1864) in the Anglican Churchman’s Family Magazine, a magazine to which Winchester author Charlotte M. Yonge was also a youthful contributor. ‘The Lesson of the Water Mill’ became a popular religious song in the UK and US. Some of her hymns, including ‘Saviour, Now the Day is Ending’ and ‘Sleep on Beloved’, are still occasionally sung. A volume of Doudney’s poems, Psalms for Life appeared in 1870.
Her first novel was Under Grey Walls (1871), but Archie’s Old Desk (1872) launched her career, and was well-known enough in the following decades to receive a mention in Clayhanger (1910) by Arnold Bennett. Doudney’s other novels include Nelly Channell (1883), Thy Heart’s Desire (1888), and A Vanished Hand (1896). Portsmouth and Hampshire appear throughout her work, but of all her novels, The Great Salterns (1875) is perhaps the most focused on the city.
Doudney was the daughter of George Ebenezer Doudney, co-owner of a soap and candle business with factories in Mile End, Portsmouth and Plymouth and Lucy Doudney. Her uncle, David Alfred Doudney, was an evangelical clergyman and editor of The Gospel Magazine who lived at 386, Mile End Terrace. The family’s evangelicalism and Calvinism were the abiding influence on Doudney’s career. In Sarah’s early childhood, the Doudney family moved to the Hampshire village of Catherington, and during this time she attended a Southsea school for French girls, Madame Dowell’s College. Doudney remained in Catherington until around the age of thirty, but is listed in the 1871 census as living once more in Portsea. By 1881 she was in Widley, Hampshire, and in 1891 in Derby Road, Portsea. After the death of her mother in 1891 and her father two years later, Doudney relocated to Oxford, and continued her writing career for more than a decade before retiring. She died in 1926.
If you have any comments, corrections, or suggestions in relation to the map please contact Dr Mark Frost, English Literature Department, University of Portsmouth: mark.frost@port.ac.uk